


What A Tale Your Thoughts Could Tell

by Namarie



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Christmas Is Canon, F/M, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02, Sort Of, lyatt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 08:37:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20963645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Namarie/pseuds/Namarie
Summary: Lucy gets a reminder from an unexpected source, about both the past and the near future.





	What A Tale Your Thoughts Could Tell

~~

She’s walking out into the common area of the bunker, dressed in her usual oversized sweatshirt, jeans, and thick socks. It’s not as cold as it usually is down here, which is the first thing Lucy notices vaguely that’s out of the ordinary.

The common area is nearly deserted. Flynn is the only one there, and he’s sitting on that ugly old couch. That doesn’t strike her as odd at first – except for the fact that he’s flipping through what she recognizes right away as her and Wyatt’s big photo album of the twins. He’s absorbed in the album and doesn’t notice her at first. When he does, he looks up at her and smiles. Her heart clenches. It’s been – it’s been a long time since she’s seen that smile, she knows somehow, even though that shouldn’t make sense.

“They’re beautiful girls,” he tells her, in that gravelly voice of his. “I can see you and Wyatt in both of them.”

Lucy returns his smile. “Thank you,” she says. “Wyatt thinks Amy has more of my eyes, but I could go either way.”

Flynn looks down at the album again. Lucy pauses for a moment, and then comes to sit next to him. She can’t help grinning and letting out an “Awww” as she sees which photo he’s looking at: it’s from their first Christmas with the twins, Wyatt and her in front of the barely-decorated Christmas tree in their house. The new parents both look exhausted. However, there’s no mistaking the love in their eyes as they stare down at their little girls, asleep under the huge holiday bows on top of each of their car seats. It’s one of Lucy’s (many, many) favorite family photos.

But after several moments of looking at it, the very familiar photo starts to change. For a second, Carol Preston is sitting next to Lucy by the tree, gazing at her granddaughters with love – genuine, unfiltered love – in her eyes. Lucy gasps. But then her mother is gone, and there’s Amy – adult Amy, the sister no one but Lucy remembers. She’s behind Lucy, head thrown back in a laugh. And then she’s gone, too.

When she looks up, Flynn is giving her that intent look. “It’s not true, you know,” he says, after a beat.

“What isn’t?”

“They’re not gone.” He glances down at his left hand, and somehow she knows he’s looking at his wedding band even though she can’t even see it from this angle.

It’s only then, at that point in the dream (because it has to be a dream, of course it does), that Lucy realizes the oddest part of all of this. “Not even you?” Asking the question feels strangely like a betrayal. Like she’s making him sacrifice himself again by acknowledging the fact that Garcia Flynn has been dead for … well, it depends on which timeline you’re counting from. It’s too complicated to work out while she’s not actually awake. Longer than the girls have been alive, at any rate.

But he shakes his head with a half-smile. “Oh, you don’t need to worry about me, Lucy,” he says. The smile gets wider, and an expression she’s never seen on his face appears: contentment. “I’m not alone. I have my girls again.”

She hasn’t figured out what, if anything, she believes about an afterlife. If she believes in it at all. Still, in this dream at least, his statement makes her sigh in relief. “I’m glad to hear it,” she tells him.

“I would have liked to meet my namesake in person, though,” he goes on, touching a picture of baby Flynn Logan. “And your sister’s, of course.”

“They would love you, I’m sure.” She imagines them playing with their Uncle Garcia, and … and their older cousin Iris. It’s a nice image.

Suddenly the photo album, the couch – even the bunker – it’s all fading around her. Flynn is still there, though, as the two of them stand in a shadowy hallway somewhere. He seems very serious now. “Lucy,” he says, and then stops.

Lucy reached out to touch his arm. It’s only half substantial. He’s fading, too. The thought makes her feel like panicking. “Wait! Please!”

“You know I can’t do that,” is his apologetic response. As his edges start to blur, he meets her eyes one more time. “You have a responsibility. Please don’t forget it.”

Before she can ask him what he’s talking about, Lucy wakes up in bed with a little gasp.

The bedroom is dark. Wyatt is asleep next to her, seeming not to have moved since his head hit the pillow last night. On another night, Lucy would have spent these minutes of wakefulness lost in thought, or watching her husband sleep, or maybe planning the day for Amy and Flynn tomorrow. But tonight (this morning, whatever time it is), she has something else on her mind. That dream had been so vivid. She hasn’t dreamed about Garcia Flynn or the bunker in months. She’s never had a dream with him or that place in it that was anything like this one.

And then, as she does her best to hang onto the fragments of it that are already getting less clear, a realization jolts her. She knows what dream-Flynn was trying to tell her – or what her subconscious was reminding her of, if she wants to be more accurate and less fanciful. Because it’s almost Christmas, and it’s the end of 2021, and that means the year when Lucy is supposed to go back and meet a devastated Garcia Flynn who has just lost his family to Rittenhouse is approaching quickly. Which further means she can’t keep putting off her responsibility of finishing the journal.

She’s been working on it on and off ever since that last Time Team trip to a Korean war zone. It’s not like there are loads of key details missing. She has always known the importance of recording things while they’re fresh in her memory, after all. There are a few things left to write, though, and raising a pair of energetic, intelligent, curious little girls while holding down a job as a history professor has been pretty distracting the last couple of years.

But that’s not enough of an excuse. If she (and Wyatt, and Rufus, and the rest of their little found family) want Flynn to be able to get this fight against Rittenhouse started the way he’s supposed to, the journal needs to be finished. There’s no time like the present, she thinks, with a heavy dose of irony. So she eases herself out from under the covers, shivering a little at the colder air, and slips her feet into the slippers on the carpet by the bed. Wyatt doesn’t have to be awake for this. Even though her eyes have adjusted as much as possible to the pre-dawn darkness, though, she manages to whack her arm on the bedside table in the process of grabbing the sweatshirt she’d left lying on the armchair. She winces.

After a few seconds in which she can’t hear or see any movement from Wyatt, Lucy breathes a small sigh of relief and continues over to her desk. She’s just successfully opened the bottom drawer (pretty quietly, or so she thought) when her husband’s confused, sleepy voice startles her. “Lucy? What’re you doing up?”

“Hey. Sorry.” She turns on the lamp (might as well at this point). Then she turns around, catching him as he yawns and runs a hand through his hair. He found a strand or two of gray the other morning, but that hasn’t decreased his attractiveness to her one bit. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I just...” She isn’t sure she wants to try to explain her sudden urgency.

He blinks and looks toward the window. “It’s still dark outside.”

“Yeah, I-- I know.” Lucy puts the journal on the desk. “I just have to write something.”

Wyatt blinks again, now looking even more confused. “Wait. Am I crazy, or did we just do a couple of lines from _Hamilton_? You’re not about to go duel some sympathetic asshole, are you?”

Lucy gets the reference after a second and laughs. “No, I can promise you I’m not sneaking off to a dueling ground, or anywhere else,” she informs him. Then she sighs again. “It’s just-- I had a dream about Flynn. Garcia Flynn, I mean. So...” She picks up the little blue book, and holds it so he can see it.

“Ah.” He pulls off the covers and scoots to her side of the bed. “You’re pretty close now, aren’t you?”

“Pretty close,” she agrees, “but not done. And I know that if I don’t _make_ time to get that last little bit done, it won’t happen.”

He picks up her phone (it’s the closest right now) and squints at it. “So you decided to make time at 2:37 in the morning, on your last day of school for the semester?”

Lucy shrugs. “No time like the present?” she offers.

Much as she expected, he chuckles and shakes his head. “I guess you’re one of the few who’s really qualified to say that. But I happen to agree for the most part.”

“For the most part?”

At that, he stands up so he can come over and pull her into an embrace. “I mean, we had a few pretty great moments traveling around in the past,” he points out, “but nothing that outweighs our present.”

She definitely agrees with that, and to make sure he knows, she tightens her grip on him. “Yeah.” Their daughters are asleep in their room just across the hall. The world is safe from Rittenhouse. And then she meets his eyes. “Which is thanks to Flynn.”

“Thanks to Flynn,” Wyatt agrees easily, “_and_ all of us. But I see what you’re saying … and if you really want to finish up the journal right now, I’m not really objecting.”

Lucy considers. Then she nods. “I think I do want to. But I’ll take it out to my office. You don’t have to stay awake with me.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” She takes his hand. “Besides, one of us needs to be awake tomorrow morning when Amy comes in here at her usual ungodly hour.”

He laughs and kisses her head. “That’s true. I’ll try to keep them both occupied for as long as possible once they come in here. Tell them their mom was up late saving the world some more.”

He says it lightly, but Lucy knows he believes it. She tilts her head back so she can kiss him on the lips. Then she told him, “Just as long as you don’t make them think I was fighting off bad guys inside our house. That might freak them out a little bit – especially Flynn.” Both of their daughters are fearless, most of the time, but Flynn tends to be kind of over-imaginative when she hears a story that might be considered scary.

“Good point. I’ll keep it one hundred percent G-rated, I promise.”

With that, Lucy turns to head down the hall to her office. She has a responsibility to a friend – and though it sounds really overdramatic in her head – to history, which she intends to fulfill.

~

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind", which I strongly recommend listening to if you never have. The lyrics seem very _Timeless_ appropriate to me.
> 
> Thanks for reading! This idea came to me on the way home from work, and I wrote it all almost in one sitting. I miss these characters and this show.
> 
> Thanks also to Mack_the_Spoon for her beta.


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